Stellar's Plan to Win Global Payments: Play Nice With the Finance Cops

MEXICO CITY - There's a mobile app approved by the Mexican government that lets 20,000 migrant workers in the U.S. pay bills back home over the Stellar network.

This theme came up again and again at the Stellar Meridian conference this week in Mexico City, with roughly 350 people, most of whom were building on Stellar, in attendance.

"Making sure Stellar is useful for actual people" was always the goal, said Jed McCaleb, who created the cryptocurrency in 2014.

McCaleb now serves as the chief technical officer of the Stellar Development Foundation at a time when the race over blockchain-based global payments is increasingly crowded.

Stellar's advantage is that it's already here and moving - with a built-in compliance layer just above the protocol itself.

Pavel Matveev of Wirex, a startup for global crypto-to-fiat value transfer, told the assembled Stellar fans, "It's actually quite risky not be regulated."

As it happens, Libra has basically the same vision as Stellar - speed, low fees, financial inclusion, easy token creation.

The founder of Interstellar Wallet and Exchange, argued that Stellar's advantage for reaching the unbanked is not its cryptocurrency, XLM. Rather, it's the system of "Anchors," the Stellar lingo for companies making asset-backed tokens on the network.

"Stellar, bitcoin, that's the first wave. The next wave is asset-backed tokens," Mbenkum said.

Stellar Development Foundation senior strategist Lisa Nestor and Stellar founder Jed McCaleb speak at Meridian 2019, photo by Brady Dale for CoinDesk.